Aliens have always been interesting to me. Hollywood has always portrayed alien encounters as being violently motivated. Steven Spielberg has avoided this trend in some of his movies such as 'Close Encounters of the third kind' and 'ET'. Now comes "The Fourth Kind". A part documentary, part Hollywood piece of garbage brought to us from director Olatunde Osunsanmi.
This film stars Milla Jovovich as Dr. Abigail Tyler, a psychologist investigating strange happenings in her small Alaskan Town of Nome. Jovovich is good here, there is no doubting that, but its unfortunate that she has nothing to work with. She works by hypnotizing her patients to look deeper into their uncontrolled thoughts. She notices that a few of her patients have had the same experience and seen the same things in the middle of the night. She relates because she too had a strange encounter in the middle of one night in which her husband was murdered. Original technique is what kills this film in my eyes. Osunsanmi layers "real documentary footage" with the films actors footage and it has them saying the same thing simultaniously. This is not only too much to look at, it is just downright annoying.
What doesn't work for me is the ethical portion of this film. You mean to tell me that I am supposed to believe that a Psychologist, crazy or not after her own encounter, would submit archived interviews with actual patients to be publicly viewed in a Hollywood film. This is illegal under the law. Sure they say in the film that the names have been changed. But they do not even blur out the faces. In one portion of the archived footage from a police mans dash cam, we see a man kill his entire family then blow his own head off. This is completley off the wall and innapropriate if it is truly real footage. There are also plot holes. Tyler has two children both under the age of 12. At one point she gets up in the middle of the night and leaves the house to help a patient that is in need of immediate assistance. Who is watching the kids? She is recently a single parent. Another portion that did not work for me is the completley over the top performance of Will Patton as an FBI agent investigating Tyler. Patton is usually very good but here he is unwatchable. Overall, what kills this film is the notion of reality. If it is real, which they give us a choice to believe it or not near the end, I will retract my statements. I do believe that aliens exist, but I do not believe in Dr Abigail Emily Tyler's Story.
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